much--particularly longs for it. She'll take an interest too," he went
on; "you must let me immediately bring her to you. She has heard so
much about you and she really wants to see you."

"Oh mercy _me_!" poor Julia gasped again--so strangely did history
repeat itself and so did this appear the echo, on Murray Brush's lips,
and quite to drollery, of that sympathetic curiosity of Mrs. Drack's
which Mr. Pitman had, as they said, voiced. Well, there had played
before her the vision of a ledge of safety in face of a rising tide;
but this deepened quickly to a sense more forlorn, the cold swish of
waters already up to her waist and that would soon be up to her chin.
It came really but from the air of her friend, from the perfect
benevolence and high unconsciousness with which he kept his
posture--as if to show he could patronize her from below upward quite
as well as from above down. And as she took it all in, as it spread to
a flood, with the great lumps and masses of truth it was floating, she
knew inevitable submission, not to say submersion, as she had never
known it in her life; going down and down before it, not even putting
out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the
young man's very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright
nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray
blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and
mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but "marked" in
a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could
see from a mile off, and as graceful, for common despair of imitation,
as the curves of the "copy" set of old by one's writing-master--it was
as if this stately well-wisher, whom indeed she had never exchanged
a word with, but whom she had recognized and placed and winced at
as soon as he spoke of her, figured there beside him now as also in
portentous charge of her case.

He had ushered her into it in that way as if his mere right word
sufficed; and Julia could see them throne together, beautifully at one
in all the interests they now shared, and regard her as an object of
almost tender solicitude. It was positively as if they had become
engaged for her good--in such a happy light as it shed. That was the
way people you had known, known a bit intimately, looked at you as
soon as they took on the high matrimonial propriety that sponged over
the more or less wild past to which you belonge